Four ex-Googlers have launched Otto, a startup aimed at making big rigs autonomous. The San Francisco based company has drawn employees form Apple, Tesla, and Cruise Automation. Backchannel.com reports that they will aim to retrofit existing semis instead of trying to build new trucks from scratch. There are over 4 million big rigs on the highways. Otto has already installed their system on 3 big rigs. They claim to be able to do the retrofit for a ‘small fraction’ of the 100-300 grand it costs for a new big rig tractor cab.

In case you missed it, Twitter is getting ready to exclude pictures and links from the 140 character limit sometime in the next couple weeks. Thenextweb.com notes that links currently gobble up 23 characters out of that miserly 140. No official word from Twitter as yet.